Star Citizen: Last Call (Sort Of)

April 28th, 2013, 05:17

Hi guys,

I know that everyone (including myself ) is still bleeding from the Divinity Original Sin Kickstarter but if you have any cash to spare and if you care the least bit about a AAA space sim with a single player campaign and a persistent universe, well, then check out Star Citizen's latest update here.

Special attention should be paid to the Why Back Now? section where Chris Roberts & co are presenting some excellent reasons why it's not too late to hop on the bandwagon yet.

They have even gone as far as adding two new stretch goals:

$9M STRETCH GOAL: If we can make it to $9 million in total pledges before the new site launches, we’ll go ahead and put a cool Roberts Space Industries Class II space suit in your closet, colored to match the new site! What’s more, every current pledger will get Lifetime Insurance! This will be your last opportunity to get LTI before the game launches.

$10M STRETCH GOAL: Our big goal before the website is $10 million. That’s a crazy amount of money, but we have a plan for it: $10 million would allow Cloud Imperium to build our own mocap studio rather than hiring out time from someone else. Renting mocap equipment and studio time is expensive: upwards of $35,000 a day, with four hours work for each 30-second segment. Having our own studio would cost more right now but will allow us to produce a lot more content for Star Citizen in the long run! We’ll provide more details very soon, but here’s one thought right now: it would even allow us to mocap a few lucky fans into the finished game!

By the way, I have backed a number of high profile Kickstarter projects now including Divinity Original Sin, Elite: Dangerous, Project Eternity, Shroud of the Avatar and, of course, Star Citizen, and let me assure you that out of those games, Star Citizen is by (VERY) far the one with the best and most frequent updates. Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games are plain awesome!

Just check out their Comm Link history (= website/game news including the weekly Wingman's Hangar videos) or the Spectrum Dispatch section with lore of the game (I mean the game is barely out of crowdfunding and already has DAYS worth of reading material right there!). Or check out the Aurora starter ship brochure. The attention to detail and the design process is simply amazing!

OK, I know I'm starting to sound like someone from the Cloud Imperium marketing department but as a space sim fan and a fan of Chris Roberts' past games, I just want to help get the word out there.
Please read Chris Roberts' message and help him, help us achieve those next stretch goals and even more independence from outside investors.

Is it just me or should they be grateful to have gotten almost 9 million??? I think I'd be quite happy with that amount, you'd not hear a peep outta me after getting that much. I mean, I did support this, and still do, but really…..nine million???

Originally Posted by wolfing
I don't remember why I didn't go for it in kickstarter. I think it has non-consentual PvP?

The game is going to have a slider for PvP where you can choose the likelihood of a PvP encounter on a scale from 'never' to 'always'. The game will automatically assign people with similar slider settings to the same game instance.
There are, however, areas in the game, on the fringes of the galaxy, where you may get involved in PvP encounters even if you have the slider turned all the way down. There's a quick explanation by a dev (Ben Lesnick) and a community discussion in this thread.

Personally, I originally felt that this system was a pretty bad idea. PvP should always be a totally unambiguous affair in my opinion where you know exactly when you're red and thus potentially dead. That's why I wasn't a big fan of an 'analogue' slider instead of a 'digital' PvP on/off switch either.
But the latest signs all point towards a PvE-friendly design where you should be able to fly around unmolested by griefers for most of the time

Originally Posted by redman5427
Yes, isn't that the record for Kickstarter?

Star Citizen holds the record for a crowdfunded game but not the Kickstarter record. It "only" raised $2.1 million on Kickstarter and the other $4.1 million for the combined $6.2 million campaign total via RSI's own website. They definitely put the focus on their own offering to circumvent the Kickstarter fees.
The Kickstarter record for video games is held by Torment: Tides of Numenera with a final campaign tally of $4,188,927.

Just a little note: If you find that you cannot upgrade your current package (clicking on arrow icons and whatnot) on the Star Citizen website, hang tight. Seems to be a website issue, according to forum posts, which hopefully will be ironed out soon.

They've been throwing all sorts of microtransactions all over the place. MOST unseemly but I don't think it's going to bother me. That should only really apply to the RSI-run persistent game. It won't matter for the single player campaign and it won't matter for independent servers. If you want to run mods you have to run on independent servers anyway so…

Yeah, I sure didn't expect this game to dirty itself with transactions such as these, but so long as they don't interfere with the single player version, I suppose I can live with it. I'll never comprehend why someone would sully their game like this, however.

Why does he need motion capture studio for a space sim? Sounds like Chris still wants to make movies.

— “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
"Those who dont read history are destined to repeat it."– Edmund Burke